


In Sickness And

by infinimato



Series: Captain Trips Is Not The Name Of An Air Force Officer [2]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1, The Stand - King
Genre: 1000-3000 words, Alternate Universe, Crossover, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-28
Updated: 2010-01-28
Packaged: 2017-10-06 18:20:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/56478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infinimato/pseuds/infinimato
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The world has gone all to hell and Rodney McKay is my savior. Just how weird is that?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Sickness And

She wasn't a biologist but she heard the whispers about Project Blue, taking place at a facility not far from them in Western California. There was talk that the illness going around wasn't just a bad flu, but some experiment gone bad. After three years on Atlantis, she'd seen her share of experiments gone bad. She could believe.

She'd fallen asleep at her lab table again, and she'd had that same dream. The dream with the old woman. "You'll come see me, child," the old woman told her, over and over again. "It's gonna be rough at first, but that grouchy man will help you. You'll see." She always woke up wondering what it all meant. As always, she shrugged it off.

It was a far more comforting dream than the other one. The other dream scared her. She'd only had it twice, but it had been the same both times. A dark, scary man, with glowing eyes, and a voice telling her that there was a place for someone with her talents, and rich rewards for them. That dream made her wake up in tears.

She'd been in her lab for three days straight. When she'd last gone home she'd filled a backpack: clothing, some powerbars, some other necessities. As she'd gone to leave her landlady's door had opened and the woman had started screaming at her, something incoherent about someone coming home late and drunk. She had run, frightened.

This sickness, and what it did to people, scared her, but she found comfort in her work.

She was starting to nod off again when a loud noise startled her awake. It took her a moment to realize it was gunshots.

Heavy boots were approaching her door. She scrambled around looking for a hiding place. Stupidly she stopped to grab her pack and that's when she felt the hand grab her arm.

"Well, look here," leered the Airman who grabbed her. "I seem to have found us a prize!"

The other grunted. "She's just another useless scientist. I bet she's, like, a botanist or something useless. He said to only get the important ones."

The one holding her arm shook her and demanded, "What's your field, little girl? What do you do?"

She opened her mouth but nothing came out but squeaks. The men laughed at her. "Looks like we caught us a mouse!" one exclaimed.

"I am a physicist," she said, finally finding her voice. She had no idea if this would save her life or end it.

"All right! We got us a physicist and a cute girl to boot!" The man holding her spun her around and quickly bound her arms behind her with a zip tie.

"Can we have some fun with her?" the other Airman said, almost whining. An ice cold feeling went through her. To survive the sickness only to have these degenerates-

"Shut up," said the one who seemed to be the leader. "We need to get the other scientist and head out on our way."

The leader grabbed her arm and all but dragged her out into the hallway, then up the elevator to the exit. There they met up with another Airman and Dr. Arnold, one of the electrical engineers she knew only in passing. He was bound the same as she and looked as terrified as she felt.

Once they got to the open-air parking lot she nearly tripped over her own feet in horror. In the three days she'd been holed up in her lab things had gotten far worse. The cars parked around the lot were sometimes sitting haphazardly. Some had corpses inside. The guard at the gates were dead. One had obviously died from the flu, the other from a bullet. To her inexpert eye it looked self-inflicted.

The three Airmen got them into the back of a van. One got in back with them, the other climbed out front. It was hot in the back of the van.

She could see bits of where they were from the back windows. The drive from the parking lot to the main road was a little over a mile, and as it went by, backwards, she thought of all the times she'd driven it back and forth herself. So many times, since their forced return from Atlantis.

They were nearly to the main road when there was a loud bang, and the ride became rough. As the van stopped, she heard the front doors open, heavy boots, and then loud cursing. "Rotten fucking place to get a flat," someone said.

Then there was another noise. Another gunshot.

The back door flew open and the leader jumped inside. "They got Fitz!" he screamed.

"All right, in there," came a voice, a voice she'd heard before, a voice she knew. "You can come out peacefully, unarmed, or we can just sit here and let you bake in the hot sun."

The leader leaned over to the other Airman to say something when suddenly Dr. Arnold lurched himself forward, slamming himself into the leader hard enough to hear the skull crack against the side of the van. The other Airman panicked and shot Arnold.

She screamed, all the pent up terror flying out of her mouth in an unstoppable outpour.

The door to the back of the van flew open again and two guns were pointed inside. "Come out of there, now!" The Airman went to bring his gun up. Suddenly he had a hole in the center of his forehead.

She couldn't stop screaming. All the stuff she'd been through on Atlantis and she'd never made a noise. Now she couldn't stop.

Two men jumped into the back of the van. One checked the leader and Arnold, pronouncing them both dead. The other wrapped her up in his arms, softly saying, "Miko, it's ok Miko, it's ok" over and over again until she calmed down. As he held her she couldn't help thinking, "The world has gone all to hell and Rodney McKay is my savior. Just how weird is that?"

\----

They had another vehicle, a pickup truck, stashed on the main road. In the middle of the desert there weren't many hiding places. It was a bit of a hike and of course Rodney complained about the sun and the heat but she was so comforted by the way it grounded her that she was tempted to smile.

The truck was an older model, from the early '80s, and well fit the three of them across the bench seat. The second man, who had introduced himself as Lt. Keith Marshall, said that their best bet was to drive as far as possible during the cooler night, then camp in some place off the main roads during the heat of the day. It wouldn't be comfortable, most places didn't have electricity anymore, but the truck was less likely to break down if they didn't drive it in the hot sun.

She sat between them and stared at the road as it went by. The thoughts of what almost happened to her with those Airmen kept overriding other thoughts. Occasionally she would shiver, and Rodney would grab her hand and give it a quick squeeze. Sometimes she felt strong enough to squeeze back, but she couldn't return his smile.

They never discussed where they were going but they all knew.

The first night they found an old motel that seemed to have been abandoned even before the sickness came. They found a room full of reasonably clean sheets and towels, and a room to use with one very large bed. The building still had running water, amazingly, and they all took cool showers. Exhausted, they crawled into bed in the same way they rode in the truck. She felt safe between them. She fell asleep.

\---

They'd been traveling for two weeks when it happened.

Before the sickness the trip would have taken a day, Nevada roads for an hour or so into Utah, then I-70 nearly straight to Boulder. But the superhighways were all parking lots now, piles of dead cars smashed into each other, dead people inside them. Which way they were escaping was never clear, both sides of the roads were clear for at most a half mile at a time. After wasting one rough night trying to navigate just one stretch, they had given up for the back roads. Rodney commented that it was probably safer, and she silently agreed.

Most of the back roads were much clearer, and when they weren't there was usually a way around. She spent a lot of time with Rodney pouring over maps to help guide Keith on the right roads to take. They'd had to backtrack three times when a blockage had occurred some place where there was no way to get around, but mostly things had gone well.

They had just crossed the Colorado border and were setting up camp in a town ironically called "Paradox." They were in yet another motel room; this place had been busy when the sickness came and they felt lucky to find a wing of unoccupied rooms. It had taken a while of searching to find it, and she wouldn't stay behind as they asked, so she had seen, and smelled, the dead along with them.

The motel had a backup generator and Rodney was able to get it working long enough to run the waterpump enough for them to be able to take showers, which was wonderful. The last three places they had stayed had no water. They had some bottles with them but they were reserved for drinking. Still, taking a shower made her feel almost human again, and when they settled into sleep she was feeling better than she had in ages.

As they were getting dressed the next morning, Keith sneezed. She and Rodney stared at him in horror.

"What?" he said, trying to joke, "All this dust we've stirred up? It's just allergies." But Rodney, king of the allergies, hadn't snuffled once. She wanted to cry.

Rodney and Keith started fighting. Rodney wanted to stay an extra night to make sure Keith was really ok. Keith argued it was nothing and they should get going. She looked at Keith, saw how glassy his eyes looked, and walked over and put her hand on his forehead. The look on her face stopped the argument.

They stayed in the motel room for almost a week. At one point Keith seemed to be getting better, but then the tell-tale smudges under his chin appeared and they knew the end was coming. In the end it was all they could do to keep him comfortable.

When he died she was both relieved and heartbroken. She looked at Rodney and saw a single tear running down his cheek. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him fiercely.

"All the people we've lost," Rodney said, voice choked. "If only we hadn't left Atlantis. Elizabeth, Sheppard, Simpson, Katie...," and his voice cracked, " Radek, even Samantha Carter. I can't take losing people anymore."

"Maybe..." was all she could say. She couldn't finish the thought, and she stared at her feet.

"We should go on," Rodney said. "We should keep going. He'd want us to."

They packed what little they had and moved on that night.

\----

Rodney said later that their arrival in Boulder had odd timing.

They got there on the first day of September. It was a dreary, rainy day, but she rather enjoyed it after the dull daily sunshine of Nevada. Rodney was driving as they got to town and as they passed by a power transformer on a pole it exploded.

He looked at her and commented, "I hope that's not a sign of things to come." She grabbed his hand and squeezed. They drove on into town.

 

The next day they found out that the explosion had been caused by an attempt to bring the power station back online. This discovery turned into Rodney squabbling with two men named Ralph Brettner and Brad Kitchner, the latter in charge of the "Power Committee," and the former on the governing committee. Rodney, truly coming back into himself, declared them both morons and insisted on being shown what they were doing so he could fix things properly. In between Rodney's reminders to all of his genius she resolved to herself to try to explain to them that, under all his bluster and babble, Rodney really was a gem.

Later that day all hell broke loose. A bomb went off place where the governing committee met, killing seven and injuring twenty more. Then someone named "Mother Abigail" was said to have returned from a trip. She wasn't too surprised to find that this was the old woman who had appeared to her in her dreams.

\----

Weeks had gone by and life was progressing. She felt herself slowly coming out of her shell. She worked most days with Rodney, who was, as usual, doing a hundred and one things, especially now that the power was back online and (mostly) stable.

Rodney had been offered a place on a variety of committees, including the governing one, but refused them all, asking the governing folks to "please just listen to me." They'd already learned a few times that he had good ideas and was critical to getting the city back to life. Already they were working on projects to better automate the power station so less personnel were required on site.

The one big thing he had pressed upon the Free Zone committee, time and time again, was to watch for scientists and Air Force officers. She knew it was unlikely that any of the folks they knew were still alive -- those that weren't assigned to Area 51 with them were mostly at the SGC, which was far closer to Boulder than they'd been. If they were still alive they'd be here already.

Unlike Rodney she'd long given up hope, so she wasn't prepared for the day the word came in that a bunch of Air Force officers were heading in to town. For a moment she remembered the Airmen who had tried to take her -- probably to Las Vegas, to him -- and she shuddered. Then she saw the light in Rodney's eyes and she got back some of her hope. For him, she would have hope.

The new folks were being brought to them from the border. She followed Rodney, on full babble at poor Stu Redman: "I'm telling you, there are a bunch who are scientists, too. If Samantha Carter is still alive, well, don't tell her I said so, but it'll be a real boon to the town. And Carson, well, no offense to Richardson, but he's the best doctor in two -- well, really, if it is them, we'll have even *more* brain power, so we should be able to get that power equipment you want up and running before we-"

Behind Rodney she saw what ground his babble to a stop: the faces of Colonel Sheppard and Doctor Beckett, some Airmen and Marines she remembered from Atlantis, Colonel Carter and Doctor Jackson from the SGC, who had once come to visit on the Odyssey, and the tall dark man with the gold thing on his head who must be the ex-Jaffa that worked with them, and over there was Major Lorne with Tom Cullen at his side like a puppy who had found a new home.

Rodney said, "Oh my God, it is you," and promptly passed out. And then Carson was leaning over him, and Colonel Sheppard was telling her how great it was to see her and Major Lorne gave her a big hug as did one of the Marines (Laurel, that was her name, she used to come to poker nights sometimes) and suddenly she could smile, and she found that she just couldn't stop.


End file.
